They hope to determine scientifically whether non-humans can really use something like language to communicate. They began planning a project to study Bunny and other dogs like her who are learning to use the buttons. Bunny is now 15 months old, and her system has expanded into a mat with over 70 buttons.Īfter Devine’s videos started picking up traction in early spring, Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego, started discussing them with people in his department. Inspired by Hunger, Devine diligently trained Bunny from puppyhood and started setting up her own system one button at a time.
The board is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device - an umbrella term for tools from boards with symbols on them to speech-generating devices - which is typically used by nonverbal people to communicate without speech.
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They haven’t gotten anywhere close to an answer yet, but they’re gathering a lot of data along the way.īunny’s journey started when Devine saw videos from Christina Hunger, a speech-language pathologist who has been teaching her dog Stella to use a board full of buttons with words prerecorded on them. One question persists among fans and skeptics alike: is this dog really “talking”? Inspired by Bunny’s videos, researchers at the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego are trying to find out. “Most of the memes are really funny, I got a good laugh out of them,” she says.Īlong with Bunny’s demands for scritches, Devine, an artist and self-identified nonexpert in dog science, fields hundreds of questions from humans every day. There are parody videos on TikTok and existential jokes on Twitter about Bunny’s sentience.
People are fascinated by Bunny and her ability to “talk.” She has 5 million followers on TikTok, and the likes on each video are in the hundreds of thousands. #whataboutbunny #sheepadoodle #hunger4words #BestFriendDay #mydogtalks #petroutine #talkingdog #cute #smartdog #tiktokdog #cutepup #aac ♬ original sound - I am Bunny
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